This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies and for Terry Gross. In 1955 Joyce Nelson, a 13-year-old

black teenager in Mayflower, Texas, was hanging out with her cousin listening to music on a cafe

jukebox. In an interview, decades later, she described what happened. We was all in having fun, playing music, and my cousin said, do you want to dance? We're here to live noise. All of a sudden, he turned my hand loose and fell to the floor. And I heard people saying, you just killed that boy. And I looked down on the floor and he was laying down there.

Her cousin, 16-year-old John Earl Reese, was shot through the cafe window by two white men, angry that a school was being built in town for black kids. That interview is from a documentary about the work of the Northeastern University Law School's Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, founded by our guest, Margaret Burnham. The project co-directed by MIT Political Science Professor Melissa Nobles, has documented racial violence of the Jim Crow era in the United States.

Often unearthing cases never reported in local media and undocumented in court records. The project has assembled a database of roughly a thousand murders between 1930 and 1955. In nearly all cases, the perpetrators escaped any punishment.

Burnham Chronicle, some of the most compelling cases, and explores the legal and institutional underpinnings of Jim Crow violence in a new book. Margaret Burnham is a professor of law, who has worked as a civil rights lawyer, the defense attorney, and a judge in Massachusetts.

She was also one of five people appointed by President Biden to the Civil Rights Cold Case Review Board, created by Congress to improve public access to records of unsolved, racially motivated crimes. Burnham's new book is by Hans, now known, Jim Crow's legal executioners. Margaret Burnham, welcome to Fresh Air.

Thank you, Dave. So pleased to be here. I got to say this book is devastating, and there are just so many cases of black people murdered with impunity, almost no matter what the circumstances.

And I'd like you to share one that researchers in your project came up with. This was a case in 1944 of a black woman in her 60s who was looking at a can of oil in a general store in Donaldson, Georgia. What happened?

This woman, as you say, in her 60s, picked up a can. Apparently the shop owner was upset about something she did in the store, because as she left, he followed her outside of the store and killed her, beat her to death with an axe.

The gentleman was a young man, but all we knew about this case was what we found out from a letter that was in the NAACP file written by a resident who didn't give her name.

We knew nothing about who she was and our students and began their investigation with that letter.

Right. And did you find anything in local media, anything in court records, anything more about the case?

Nothing in court records. Our students were able to discover that the victims was a woman named Ali Hunter and that indeed she was in her mid 60s.

We were able to obtain her death certificate and we were also able to rule out any legal process in Donaldson film as far as we know.

There was never any prosecution of the killer. The case certainly never reached federal authorities.

So what lesson do you draw from the fact that this horrific crime appears really just in a single letter to the New York office of the NAACP?

Didn't make the papers. Didn't make the local justice system.

Well Dave, we started this project because we knew there was much more to be discovered about the Jim Crow period and about the ways in which violence structured and protected Jim Crow.

And we knew that some cases were known. We knew that a lot had been written about Jim Crow, but it became pretty apparent to us quite quickly that there were hundreds of cases very much like Ali Hunters that just disappeared into thin air.

And you know, Ali Hunter story is typical in that it reflects the consequences of stepping across sometimes very visible and sometimes not so visible.

Jim Crow lines of violating Jim Crow norms and manners as it were. We know nothing about what it was that upset the man who murdered Ali Hunter.

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